Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I've got some political/economic/philosophical thoughts to try to organize, but I feel I should get some "what I've been up to" out of the way first, and try to find time to turn rambling musings into a coherent presentation of ideas later. This entry contains stuff that'll still work if left all rambly, so my words-per-minute will be higher.

So, the long-promised last-weekend weekend-before-last entry (I started writing this last week) ...

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Saturday (2006-05-06) was a mix of frustrations and blessings. It started well enough, with silmaril and Breno arriving to give me a ride to the Spoutwood Fairie Festival where Thrir Venstri Foetr was to perform. I was going to be on guitar and recorder instead of double-bass and recorder, so fitting into Breno's car was actually possible. I hadn't eaten breakfast, gotten enough sleep, or been able to find my hat, but I didn't have to stay alert enough to drive. Which, ah, contributed to the first mishap. There's a lot to be said for nifty conversation that passes the time quickly, but its effects one the ability to spot road signs is not among those things. All three of us overlooked our exit and we wound up twenty miles too far north.

Easily enough remedied spatially, but damaging temporally. An 11:50 arrival at the parking lot for a 12:00 set -- not good. (It's a good thing we were already following the advice that maugorn so emphatically suggested at rehearsals afterward, and planning to arrive much earlier than our scheduled start time, so there was that bit of time for something to go wrong and still get there.) So we were walking rather quickly, threading the crowd, when we passed the poor, misguided protesters shouting Christian-inspired (I'll not credit their theology with being consistent enough to warrant the denominational label without a qualifier) slogans and catchphrases over a fence at all the attendees on the path to the front gate. Theology aside, there were flawed assumptions about the festival and the folks attending it, obvious even at the speed with wich we passed them by.

Oh no! Magical creatures! A mix of people who a) believe in magical creatures, b) believe they are magical creatures, c) want to believe in magical creatures, d) like the idea of magical creatures without believing in them, and e) just want to go enjoy music and a day in the sun while considering the magical creatures unimportant stage-decoration! They must all be Pagans! Oh no! Maybe shouting at them will make them abandon their debauched plans to attend a ... very family-oriented event? (I wish I'd been wearing my larger, more obvious cross, when I shouted back at the protesters, to make the error of one of their assumptions more obvious.) Let's take a moment to review, shall we? The Bible is actually quite clear on the appropriateness of magic, and it says the same thing several times in pretty much the same way each time: do not consult the fortune-tellers of the people you just conquered. I think most of us can follow that advice easily enough, whether we attend fun festivals or not, right?

We actually got to the stage, where maugorn and the dancers were waiting for us, by noon according to my watch (which is really my cell phone, which corrects itself to whatever Cingular's network clock says), but opening cases, plugging in, and tuning still meant starting the set five minutes late and not warmed up. I didn't play great the first few tunes, but there was also a problem getting enough signal from my pickup to the board, so I'm not sure anybody but maugorn heard me. The weather was wonderful for physical comfort and visual beauty, but the pleasant cross-stage breeze was stiff enough to stuff the notes right back into the recorders, and the recorder I used most was the bass, which is more susceptible to that effect than smaller ones are. I saw silmaril shielding her recorder from the wind; when I switched from guitar to recorder I sometimes had to turn my back to the rest of the band and the wind still stole some of my notes.

The stage was an especially good one for taking advantage of pre-gathered crowds -- across from the main group of food vendors and downhill from a bunch of canopy-shaded tables. We can usually gather a crowd to us easily enough, but here we had a head start. And they looked like they were enjoying the show.

The second set went better, due largely to not having just rushed in at the last minute. In between, we wandered around the festival a bit, ate yummy food, and found a place to sit and talk. There were a fair number of folks I knew there, to run into.

The three of us didn't hang around after our second set -- I had to save my spoons for the next day, and the other two had evening plans. We did grab a bite at the Paper Moon diner in north Baltimore on the way back. All in all, a good day. A tiring day, but I didn't use up all my energy.

<hr width="25%> <p>I'm going to cut this here, and put the next day in another entry.</p>